I'll be starting some of the living greek material soon, more than likely with Sebastian Carnazzo. but for now I only have "Learn New Testament Greek" by "John H Dobson".

I want to learn the right pronunciation for "living" greek. Is there a good reference from this somewhere online? I am guessing it varies at least slightly from the Dobson book? I don't want to have to re-learn pronunciation later on.

I had to write something up on Greek Pronunciation for a course I just took and thought I would share it here:

We don’t actually know how Ancient Greek was pronounced. Today, there are four main schemes followed in pronouncing Ancient Greek.

Modern Greek pronunciation is not recommended because it many vowels have become “ioticized.” The vowels η, υ, οι, ι are all pronounced like “ee” as in the English word “bee.”

Restored Attic pronunciation follows most of the Erasmian pronunciation conventions, but attempts to includes the tonal quality of the accents. This results in an artificial and affected sounding pronunciation that I cannot recommend.

Erasmian pronunciation was originally promoted by the scholar Erasmus, born in the year 1466. It was an attempt to assign a single sound to each Greek letter. It did not rely on the example of the Byzantine Greek pronunciation, still used in his lifetime. Nor did come from a study of historical orthography. It resulted in a pronunciation scheme that is unnatural and difficult to pronounce. Nevertheless, this Erasmian pronunciation is used in most schools today. There are some small variations between countries. The main varieties are German, American, and British.

Restored Koine was created in the 2000’s by Dr. Randall Buth. He studied the history of the way Greek was pronounced, Modern Greek pronunciation, and especially spellings. One example of the value of spellings is that we know και was pronounced κε beccause it was often spelled that way.

The Restored Koine pronunciation scheme results in a natural sounding language that is based on historical evidence. This is the scheme I recommend. Some resources for the other schemes are also given.

Restored Koine

Extensive chart showing the Restored Koine pronunciation variation. Corresponding examples are given in English and Chichewa. Author P.D. Nitz

Here is an excellent tutorial video created by Tim McNinch on YouTube. He reads through the alphabet letter by letter, giving several words as examples. The dipthongs are treated separately in the second link. Double consonants are not treated, but can be seen in many examples.

Ομιλειν [Omilein] is a course in Ancient (Koine) Greek newly developed (2018) by Jordash Kiffiak. Kiffiak uses the Restored Koine pronunciation. The first lesson is free after a sign-up. He has good, consistent pronunciation. Taking his first lesson will give a good taste of the Restored Koine scheme.

Here is a very well read, but fast reading, of St. Mark, Chapter 1, done by Jordan Day. Reading the text as you hear this reading could be a way to learn to pronounce and read Koine fluently. 5 minutes.

Nice summary and good links, thanks. I wonder what it means that I'm very flexible with the different pronunciation systems used for ancient Greek ("treat them like dialectical differences") but woe betide anyone who uses ecclesiastical pronunciation for Latin...

And of course, if you want to be a real outlier, you can use Spanish pronunciation for Latin, like me.
(I'm fine with ecclesiastical pronunciation for Latin, if you can use it and lose your native accent. Or at least hide it well...) The main thing is, work at treating the Greek and pronouncing it as a real language, not code or disconnected words.

And of course, if you want to be a real outlier, you can use Spanish pronunciation for Latin, like me.
(I'm fine with ecclesiastical pronunciation for Latin, if you can use it and lose your native accent. Or at least hide it well...) The main thing is, work at treating the Greek and pronouncing it as a real language, not code or disconnected words.

When I started grad school, I had to take a "how to teach Latin (or Greek)" course. We met 1 hour a week for common instruction with the other language disciplines, and one hour for our own department. In one of our first meetings, the professor asked me to read a paragraph of Latin. I was fresh off a summer in Italy, and my Latin sounded a bit Italianate. Some of my classmates (there were about a dozen of us, OSU at that time had a very well funded classics department) laughed, but the professor said. "No -- that's exactly the kind of thing we need to be doing. This was a language, people, and it sounded a lot more like what he's doing than what we usually do. When you are teaching, you need to make it sound real so your students will appreciate it as a language, and not just an academic puzzle."